1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cooking apparatus, cooking system, and cooking control method using a bar code, and more particularly, to a cooking apparatus, cooking system, and cooking control method, in which food without a bar code attached thereto is automatically cooked.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, cooking apparatuses cook food using a variety of heat sources. There is a great variety of cooking apparatuses that have different heat sources on the market. A microwave oven is a cooking apparatus using microwaves as a heat source. The conventional microwave oven allows a user to directly input a cooking time, a cooking method, and an object to be cooked through a key input unit formed on a front panel of the microwave oven. Since the user manually inputs cooking data, the above conventional microwave oven is disadvantageous in that it is difficult to set proper cooking conditions and inconvenient to the user to input the complex data.
In order to solve the problems described above, a microwave oven has been developed with a bar code reader so that food is cooked according to the cooking data read by the bar code reader. That is, an internal bar code reader is installed in the microwave oven, or an external bar code reader is connected to the microwave oven. The bar code reader reads a bar code of the food and transmits cooking data of the food to a controller of the microwave oven, and the controller controls the output level and the heating time of a magnetron according to the cooking data so that the cooking of the food is carried out.
Such a microwave oven that uses the bar code cannot cook a food product without a bar code or a food product that has a damaged bar code attached to a package thereof.